OPERATION PEDRO PAN:
The Untold Exodus of 14,048 Cuban Children
By Yvonne M. Conde
Routledge, 248 pages, $27.50
Obsessions make people behave strangely, and so the mutually obsessive antagonism between communist Cuba and the U.S. over the past 40 years has led to some odd twists and turns in policies.
One of the oddest, and least explored, has to be Operation Pedro Pan, a U.S.-sponsored airlift that from 1960 to 1962 brought more than 14,000 unaccompanied childrenmyself included-out of Cuba, and is now the subject of a new book by Yvonne M. Conde.
The story of this crusade of lone children teems with high drama: toddlers arriving at the Miami airport in the arms of PanAm flight attendants; little girls with pathetic notes pleading “My name is . . . please be good to me” pinned to their blouses; success stories despite initial hardships; sordid tales of kids being sexually and physically abused in American orphanages and foster homes.
It’s a wonder that historians and foreign policy scholars have devoted so little attention to Pedro Pan, or that someone in Hollywood hasn’t turned this modern exodus story into a TV miniseries.
This general dearth of information is what makes Conde’s “Operation Pedro Pan” so eagerly awaited and also so frustrating. A freelance writer and contributing editor for Hispanic Business magazine, Conde left Cuba at the age of 10 as part of Pedro Pan, though, curiously, she didn’t realize that she had been part of the airlift or even hear about it until 1990. Her book is an impressive job of reporting dozens of personal stories and fascinating vignettes that nonetheless will leave most readers-particularly Americans unfamiliar with the saga’s outlines-scratching their heads. It’s a compilation of tales, some moving, many astonishing, that ultimately doesn’t provide a convincing answer to the bottom-line question: Why did this happen?
Among the most compelling sections of Conde’s book are its depictions of the hysteria that gripped the Cuban middle class shortly after Fidel Castro’s takeover in 1959 and that ultimately set off a massive exodus of refugees and Pedro Pan children.
By the end of 1960, all the signposts that had guided Cuba’s bourgeoisie-the Catholic Church and its private schools, the social clubs, the media, the homes and cars, and the fawning over all things American-were under communist attack. Parochial schools were closed and most clergy eventually deported; businesses taken over; newspapers and television stations turned into government mouthpieces; the long-adored U.S. vilified round-the-clock.
Conde’s staccato depiction of the communist takeover of Cuba and its political realignment toward communist China and the Soviet bloc-essentially a done deal by the end of 1961-is worth reading just to remember how quickly capitalist Cuba imploded. Her vivid descriptions of the shock among the Cuban middle and upper classes are memorable too: “Panic” doesn’t even begin to describe their state of mind.
Most frightening-and central to the Pedro Pan story-were the rumors that Castro was going to abrogate the principle of patria potestad, or the power parents had over their children. Bolas, mostly overheated rumors, rolled from one end of the island to the other, predicting all children would be taken away from their parents and sent to the Soviet Union, to indoctrination camps deep in the Cuban mountains, or worse.
Using newspaper clips, mostly from the U.S., and other circumstantial evidence, such as quotes from Lenin about the family and reports about the Castro regime’s campaign of indoctrination in the schools, Conde tries hard to establish that the patria potestad fears had a factual basis, given Castro’s clampdown on the middle class and all its symbols.
But although no one can blame the Cuban middle class for its reaction to the communist takeover, the fact is that Castro never implemented, or even very seriously contemplated, such a policy. There was plenty of indoctrination, “volunteer” work, and a massive, nationwide literacy campaign that enlisted all high-school youngsters, but no general policy to separate children from their parents.
Indeed, in what may be the biggest irony of all, Operation Pedro Pan may have torn more Cuban children away from their families than any policy Castro might have implemented.
An intriguing alternative theory, being pursued by some Cuban-American scholars, is that the hysteria over patria potestad may have been partially or totally the result of a U.S. psychological warfare campaign to destabilize Cuba by stampeding the middle class into$t an uprising. Indeed, many of the bolas about patria potestad landed in Cuba via Radio Swan and other short-wave radio stations allegedly controlled by the U.S.
In the context of the relentless U.S. hostility toward Cuba over four decades, that’s not as ridiculous as it sounds. For the past four decades, the U.S. has spared no funds, personnel or imagination in plots to overthrow Castro that have included propaganda, subversion, invasions, espionage, exploding cigars, food poisoning, airborne germs and economic strangulation. The hostility lingers on, long after the end of the Cold War and of any Cuban threat to anyone or anything.
Understandably, this hypothesis is not popular with some Cuban exiles or Pedro Pan graduates: It turns them into pawns in a far-fetched American foreign-policy scheme.
Whatever the cause, by 1960 some of the panicked Cuban parents had already begun to send their children to the U.S. alone, to live with relatives or friends here. A Miami Herald reporter later christened this flight of children “Operation Pedro Pan” after the mythical boy who could fly.
Many Pedro Pans arrived in Miami expecting to claim becas-non-existent scholarships to elite American schools that became perhaps the cruelest hoax of the program. Instead, children with no one here to meet them were bused to converted Army camps and other institutions around Miami, to await permanent relocation elsewhere in the U.S.
Though Conde sticks to the prevailing Cuban exile position that Operation Pedro Pan was an honorable and justifiable anti-communist crusade led by a saintly Roman Catholic priest in Miami, many of the anecdotes in the book are sad if not tragic. When some parents finally rejoined their children, they found them so Americanized they couldn’t even speak Spanish; other kids were scattered all over the U.S., some in abusive foster homes, orphanages or reform schools. Many children were left stranded for several years, awaiting their parents; some families never reunited.
A survey of several hundred Pedro Pans included in an appendix also reveals some seriously mixed feelings. An overwhelming majority say their parents did the right thing-but only a minority say they would do the same thing to their own children. A curious footnote, too, is that some Pedro Pans in the U.S. became so angry and disaffected that they formed pro-Castro volunteer work brigades and political groups.
Yet most Pedro Pans are undoubtedly grateful. My arrival in the U.S. alone at age 14 was a terrifying experience, and so were the next three years-first at a refugee camp in Florida, followed by three foster homes in New York-before my parents arrived in 1965.
But compared to what my boyhood friends, whom I visited when I returned to Cuba 18 months ago, have endured under communism, I certainly got the far better deal. Indeed, for most Pedro Pans, “God Bless America” has special meaning.
That relative good luck, however, doesn’t answer all the lingering questions and contradictions surrounding Operation Pedro Pan.
If Castro was so intent on kidnapping all Cuban children, why were thousands of them allowed to leave in broad daylight? Why did the U.S., whose immigration policy has historically favored family reunification, implement such a program as Pedro Pan? Why didn’t the U.S. try to bring Cuban families together? How did the Pedro Pan airlift figure in the U.S. campaign to overthrow Castro? Why did the majority of Cuban families leave together, yet several thousand choose to send their children abroad alone?
Conde’s book, a first salvo in this belated exploration of Pedro Pan, is a good primer, but only that. The definitive story of Operation Pedro Pan-and what fueled such a dramatic campaign-is still to come.
